ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 10 (UPI) — U.S. and British scientists say they’ve developed a technique that chemically turns carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide using visible light, such as sunlight.

The achievement by researchers from the University of Michigan, led by Professor Steve Ragsdale and researcher Elizabeth Pierce, and scientists from the University of Oxford, led by Professor Fraser Armstrong, opens the doors for scientists to consider what organism exists, or can be created, to accomplish the same task.

“This is a first step in showing it’s possible, and imagine microbes doing something similar,” Ragsdale said. “I don’t know of any organism that uses light energy to activate carbon dioxide and reduce it to carbon monoxide, but I can imagine either finding an organism that can do it, or genetically engineering one to channel light energy to coax it to do that.”

The research was reported in a recent, online early edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.